Plugin: FeedGrab

I just upgraded from 0.7.3 -> 0.7.6 and am now seeing the following error:

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function mb_convert_encoding() in pi.feedgrab.php on line 185

Thoughts?

I was able to get the plugin working again by using the modification previously mentioned:

if (function_exists('mb_convert_encoding'))
{
  $encoded_title = mb_convert_encoding($this->post[ "title" ], strtoupper('UTF-8'), $source_encoding );
}
elseif(function_exists('iconv') AND ($iconvstr = @iconv($source_encoding, 'UTF-8', $this->post["title"])) !== FALSE)
{
  $encoded_title = $iconvstr;
}
else
{
  $encoded_title = utf8_encode($this->post["title"]);
}

I am still having a new issue involving posts not being added to the DB. It’s showing:

Checking: Story Title Checking: Story Title Checking: Story Title

But it is not adding those stories…

Could really use a clarification about assigning categories with Feedgrab after reading the documentation and this thread (23 times).

I’ve gotten the standard Feedgrab to work nicely, as such:

{exp:feedgrab url="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/richardatlarge?count=15/" 
                          weblog="6" 
                          title="title"
                          date="pubDate"
                          use="link|description" 
                          fields="feed_link|feed_body" }

But it all fell apart when I attempted to grab “category” from delicious:

{exp:feedgrab url="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/richardatlarge?count=15/" 
                          weblog="6" 
                          category_field="category”
                          category_delimiter="SPACE”
                          category_group="2”
                          title="title"
                          date="pubDate"
                          use="link|description" 
                          fields="feed_link|feed_body" }

No categories were assigned, and the titles went missing (body and link remained).

I set this up just to see what would happen, as I don’t really understand how this would work. I’m wanting to add categories to each article I send to delicious and then have these categories force each article to be assigned a category in the weblog (e.g., a assign the category “drug” and then the weblog entry is categorized under the “drug” category. Is this wishful thinking? Do I need to create the categories in the blog ahead of time?

Thanks!

Hi Richard,

The import has probably fallen apart because some curly quotes have crept into the plugin call - make sure that quote marks in the new lines are the standard double quotes. (I’m pretty sure this is my fault: I think it from when you copy and paste lines from my documentation - I need to fix this…)

The plugin should then work to a degree but I think the way delicious outputs its categories does not work very well with the Magpie RSS library (that the plugin uses to read RSS feeds). delicious has multiple <category> elements for each category you specify. I’m pretty sure Magpie will only give the last category back, so each entry will only have a single category.

Andrew

I have started playing with this nice plugin and it is a very good idea.

I was wondering if there is a way to extract the channel title or if we can get information only at the item level ?

The idea is to keep track of the source of the import (useful when you import data from several different rss feeds.

Thank you

Does RSS enclosure work with feedgrab? This plugin works really well and I’ve been enjoying the automation. Recently I discovered the company that provides articles to my site also provides images. The image link can be found in “enclosure”. This is what it looks like <enclosure url=”http://site.com/media/0/176313.jpg” length= “30210” type=”image/jpeg”>. I noticed that the enclosure tag doesn’t using a closing tag and I’m wondering if feedgrab is looking for content that’s in between two tags. Has anyone used RSS enclosures successfully with feedgrab?

Yep it works with an enclosure If you have an RSS with <enclosure url=”http://myurl.com/embed/16501.jpg” length=”4543” type=”image/jpg”> you can grab the values inside the enclosure with enclosure@url Like: use=”link|description|enclosure@url|category” fields=”url_video|body|Image_vid|tag_import” Hope this helps

Anyone know how to grab thumbnail url from:

<media:thumbnail width=”66” height=”49” url=”http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45154000/jpg/_45154982_89b07fe8-b50e-43bf-a643-546d241107da.jpg”>

Best wishes Lee

Thanks for this great plugin! However, I have one urgent feature request:

Is there any way to import the image of the given url in a <media:content> field into my uploads folder?

Because I want to resize the image with the image sizer plugin, but that plugin only resizes images that are on the same server.

Hi mapu, I’m 100% certain it won’t and can’t be made to do this. Can you tell me if you have managed to grab the url from within the media:content tag and how. I haven’t managed to do it.

Best wishes Lee

Hi mapu, I’m 100% certain it won’t and can’t be made to do this. Can you tell me if you have managed to grab the url from within the media:content tag and how. I haven’t managed to do it. Best wishes Lee

This is why it was a feature request 😉

I did it with

media:content@url

And I congratulate myself for the 100th post in almost seven years 😉

I really like this plugin, but I have a request for something (at least something I don’t think it can do yet - maybe I’m wrong).

Sometimes within an attribute in an item I want only part of the attribute. I don’t need the whole thing. But as far as I can tell, I can only grab the whole attribute then either edit it manually (unlikely) or edit it out via some PHP in my template (probably)

Just to make this clearer, a line may have a segment like

id=1234

and I only want the

1234 part.

Thanks - great plugin!

Todd

So I am having some issues with FeedGrab…

{exp:feedgrab url="http://www.google.com/news?output=rss" 
                          weblog="2" 
                          title="title"
                          date="dc:date"
                          use="link|description" 
                          fields="google_headlines_link|google_headlines_desc" 
                          unique="guid"
                          }

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="googleheadlines" show_future_entries="yes" show_expired="yes"}
    {title} 
 {google_headlines_desc}
  {/exp:weblog:entries}

1) when the item are grabbed they are entered into the weblog as expected but they aren’t displayed on the template until I go into each entry and save (update)

2) when I do go into the entry with the feedgrabbed item and save it, only the title will display on the template and not anything else:

Item Title
{google_headlines_desc}

When I manually enter an entry into this weblog, everything works as expected.

I am running MSM and discussion module. the only other addons I have installed are LG Better Meta and LG .htaccess generator. Running ExpressionEngine 1.6.6…

I’m thinking there is a conflict with one of the addons, but not sure. I disabled the extensions and the problem still occurred.

I am really hoping I can get feedgrab to work! thanks!

Just for your information, we are running the following domain nearly entirely on Feedgrab: http://www.planeterlang.org/

It is a rework of our previous planet site.

Newbie question. I am using the feedgrab plugin successfully to create entries, but it only imports the fields that match the RSS 2 specs names (because I know to ask for those). When I view the RSS output in a reader, I see lots of content that ought to be in the description fields, but must be somewhere else. So how are others discovering the record layout actually used in a given RSS feed. I have a lot of feeds I want to process, but it appears that knowing the field names used is critical. What tool and method do you use to identify the record layout of a RSS or Atom feed if there is no published api for the feed?

I am having the same problem as #192.

I have several feeds working, but I only get date and title, and never get ‘description’ plugged into the appropriate fields in a few of the feeds, though I can see significant ‘body content’ in the feeds when I view them in Google Reader. I have straightened all quotes and all that stuff, but nothing seems to work.